This is typical of Trump, to first attempt to delegitimize the source of any information not congenial to his own interests. Such people and institutions become, in Trump’s lexicon, “losers” and “has-beens” and “failures” or “washed-up.”

Trump has tried this before, pretending to not know somebody he knows very well, for example, oh…Vladimir Putin comes to mind.

For Trump, it is a matter of lying fast enough to make it difficult for people to keep up and then ignoring all the reminders that he lied.

This is one lie Trump isn’t getting away with. Trump may or may not have leaked his own tax returns, but there is no doubt at all that he knows perfectly well who David Cay Johnston is.